An online brand community and digital customer care are powerful and proven channels for engaging with customers. Yet most companies operate these tools as independent functions, creating a disjointed experience.
It also means brands are leaving cash on the table.
In fact, 65% of customers with bad experiences will stop purchasing from those companies and leave them for others, according to a recent Forrester study.
To understand how these functions complement each other to boost customer engagement and loyalty, let’s take a quick look at how each serves the customer.
What is brand community? (And why it’s not the same as brand awareness)
If you’re a business or brand, you probably already know that consumer research indicates a strong correlation between the level of emotional connection a customer feels with your brand and your bottom line.
A brand community is comprised of brand customers and advocates who gather to connect around and organically promote your brand, product, or service.
Just because someone is aware of your brand or has purchased from you, doesn’t mean they’re a member of your community. Many consumers have no interest whatsoever in engaging with a brand beyond a sale, but brand community members:
- Follow your social media channels (the ones they choose, of course)
- Share their stories about how your product has improved their businesses or lives
- Share your content organically on their social media channels
- Feel emotionally connected and believe in the purpose and value of your brand
Brand community benefits: Fueling business growth
An authentic and trusted brand community serves as a space with multiple purposes for your customers. It’s a place where they can connect with each other to engage experts, ask questions, solve problems, and share new ideas with each other online.
Benefits of a brand community include:
- Driving acquisition of new customers. As they mature, communities can pull an average of nearly 70% of traffic from search engines, and that can mean new business for you.
- Faster problem solving, cutting resolution times by almost half.
- Improved customer retention and loyalty, as satisfied customers are five times more likely to repeat purchases from your business and four times more likely to refer your brand to friends and family.
Bottom line: Brand communities can build business, drive new product ideas, and spur service improvements, boosting customer loyalty.
Digital customer care: Resolutions and more
Traditionally, digital customer care — the resolution of customer challenges through social media and messaging channels — has provided a way for customers to report issues (reactive care). It’s also a way for companies to proactively share real-time operational updates as they occur.
Digital care is critical for customers seeking efficient answers on their own time, and as a way to reduce avoidable expenses associated with the unforeseen issues that inevitably occur.
Separately, community and digital care are each important avenues to engage with customers, but combining them can improve your customer experience strategy and lead to amazing results.
How to recruit brand influencers via a brand community
Customer conversations that occur in a brand community can reveal new influencers and experts. By identifying these individuals and rewarding their engagement with special recognition, status, or authority, they become even stronger ambassadors.
User-generated content supports better organic search results and higher conversion rates, as visitors place more trust in content from their peers versus brand advertisements.
Not only are these loyal and trusted advocates capable of supporting new customers, but they also generate content that can be amplified in other channels to help acquire more customers.
Save company resources, reduce response time with self-service knowledge base
A brand community can serve as a great source for a self-service knowledge base where customers and agents can:
- Quickly find answers
- Make connections to peers
- Solve problems
A brand community is a trusted, interactive way to scale support for customers, by customers.
By impacting top line growth, retention, and bottom line costs, a community can deliver value over 10x the cost.
Online communities can deflect at least 10% of customer support calls from traditional contact centers, while increasing revenue and customer retention by at least 1% each.
Concerned with the costs, time, and expertise needed to start a community?
Consider that neglecting customer support can lead to everything from public brand shaming to loss of interest in your advertising. Combine community and digital care and play into this market shift.
Identifying what matter most to customers
Find out what your customers really need. Hosting peer conversations in a safe environment can reveal unknown issues, giving brands a chance to solve them before they hit social channels and turn customers away to competitors.
These same conversations can also reveal product ideas and service improvements from those who know and use your products or services the most, ensuring your future plans are aligned with what your customers really want.
Power better conversations with a brand community
Artificial intelligence and machine learning can provide on-demand answers based on community content – delivering the best of both worlds when it comes to efficient self-service support that is also highly trusted.
Leading communities do this today, providing more relevant content and stronger peer connections by enhancing personalization with learning algorithms that automatically deliver answers when and where they do the most good.
The result is a combined digital and peer platform that helps customers while companies get the most out of their digital care and community investment.
Start connecting brand community + customer care
It’s time to tear down the silos, stop limiting engagement, and meet your customers on their terms with timely, relevant solutions.
This likely means implementing new technologies, training customer services representatives on your newly integrated approach, and thoroughly explaining the shift in strategy to them.
While this may seem like a daunting task initially, consider the benefits of this “always-on” customer engagement system outlined above. Once you set it up, your company can continue to reap the benefits for years to come.
